Phantom the Hotel

Her lavender musk was more like life than poetry or lace. She sailed through simple trees; waded gracefully through pools of laughter and all things simply social.

Sweat-hot breathed her skirt: she drank free, more or less, at the common exchange of tongue-on-tongue and ass-squeeze, or flash of tit.

Occasions she sank Lethe-ward, to the rigorously cultivated, carefully tended mind-scape in the place where phrases hide from noise, where language begets other language, and her self-sentence, wide as the cervix of a whale, yet daintily protective of itself, streaked like a train between hills, her ability to bounce back instantly, regain the moment, her starlet’s countenance, her stamina to flirt the night away, gassed on youth, lust, grit, impressed all seers.

“I’m not in ‘denial,’” she said, wistfully. “This is my next-to-last drink.”

She stunned salacious passersby and shadowy voyeurs with her narcotic spice of core perfume. No games or cocktail talk: she hungered. Feel first, taste, then smother. Birds in byzantine bowers chirp drunkenly what’s past, what’s passing and to come. Towers slouch straight-up toward Byzantium, chased by entertainment, appropriately decadent, droll, uncouth, in accordance with the appropriate circumstance of day or night.

Now is All, she knows; she burns both ends, but slow. She tries — she tries to burn out slow.

When she wakes, wherever she wakes, she recites her morning homily, regardless of weather, time. day, or other externalities:

“I have bad habits, but the trees are aware of their green today, and the check is in the mail, and the sun is drunk and loutish in the marble sky.”

Crystal Night is a singer, songwriter, comedian and "general performance artist," as she describes herself. She spends most of her off-stage time performing odd and various rebellions against Power and practicing the electric and acoustic string intstruments she builds and designs herself. She also plays a mean banjo and ain't too shabby on guitar. Crystal lives and works in The City. Read other articles by Crystal, or visit Crystal's website.